President Trump expanded his assault on woke cultures in America’s education system with executive orders signed Wednesday.
Mr. Trump signed an order that targets the education accrediting system to hit what Mr. Trump sees as discriminatory and how universities use “woke” ideology on college campuses, according to administration officials.
The order would place a greater emphasis on merit and performance as opposed to third-party organizations, which Republicans accuse of liberal biases.
“These practices have diverted focus from student success to ideological conformity, undermining academic integrity and student achievement,” a fact sheet of the order says.
Mr. Trump speculated aloud about whether an investigation could be opened on universities admitting students who weren’t fit for a prestigious university.
“They’re allowing people into school that can’t do math, yet kids who have worked really hard, number 1 in their class at a high school some place in New Jersey or in Mississippi, they can’t get into the best schools,” Mr. Trump said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement that the “existing accreditation monopoly raises costs, contributes to the ever-increasing tuition and fees faced by American families, favors legacy four-year institutions, blocks new accreditors from the market, interferes with states’ governing board decisions, and pushes universities in ideological directions when they should be focused on core subjects.”
“The result is more bureaucracy, less innovation, sprawling DEI administrative complexes, and burdensome oversight by unaccountable accreditors rather than state education leaders and duly appointed governing board members,” she said.
Another order makes sure “school discipline policies are based on objective behavior, not DEI.”
It will undo policies from the Biden and Obama administrations, like one that called for discipline “designed to equalize disciplinary rates by race, rather than simply imposing discipline based on objective behavior alone.”
Similarly, a third order does away with using disparate impact as a standard for determining whether practices violate civil rights law, thereby helping to “ensure equal treatment under the law,” the fact sheet says.
“This is a theory that underlies a lot of the modern DEI and CRT driven diversity culture,” said Will Scharf, White House staff secretary. “We want to focus on actual fairness, we want to focus on merit, not on things like disparate impact theory and the whole sort of diversity, equity and inclusion cult.”
Mr. Trump also signed four other orders, including measures that would, according to the fact sheet:
• Better implement artificial intelligence into American classrooms
• Make sure laws are enforced in regards to foreign gifts to American universities
• Create a White House initiative to promote excellence at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and “do their job as effectively and as efficiently as possible”
• Modernize American workforce programs “to prepare citizens for the high-paying skilled trade jobs of the future”
